EpitaphVR is an experimental virtual reality project that seeks to re-animate Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, honoring their legacies by placing them in dialogue with one another. Created in collaboration with Minghao Tian, we used several speeches by both figures to train a voice cloning software to mimic their voices.

To develop the avatars, I used two separate African-American models found on Adobe Fuse, augmenting their appearance to more closely resemble that of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. Once I was satisfied with their likenesses, I auto-rigged each avatar in Mixamo, applying the appropriate animations before downloading all of the necessary materials to bring into Unity.

Determining what each avatar would eventually speak was a week-long journey of reading, reflecting, revising and editing. The resulting dialogue functions more as an elegy, a funerial type of poem, than a straightforward conversation. The script that the avatars perform is inspired by the closing monologue of Ossie Davis’ play Purlie Victorious.